Day was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1897 and as a child moved with her family to San Francisco (where she survived the 1906 earthquake) and then Chicago, where her father became a newspaper editor. Day followed in her father’s footsteps, dropping out of college in 1914, after two years at the University of Illinois, to move back to New York and work as a reporter for The Call, a socialist daily paper, and later The Masses, another radical publication.

During her years as a journalist, Dorothy Day covered peace rallies, labor strikes, and other radical causes. She was also at times a participant in such protest actions: in 1917 she was jailed, along with many other suffragists, for protesting outside of the White House, and joined her fellow activists on hunger strike while behind bars.

After the end of World War One, Day turned her attention to fiction as well as journalism, and with the income she earned as a writer was able to purchase a beach house on Staten Island, where she lived with her lover Forest Batterham, a botonist. In her autobiography, The Long Lonliness, Day describes the end of their relationship in primarily religious terms: she was an increasingly-committed Catholic and he was a staunch non-believer who was unable to accept or appreciate her religious faith. According to Day, the final straw came when she became unexpectedly pregnant and decided to go through with the pregnancy against Batterham’s wishes. Her daughter Tamar was born in 1927, and shortly thereafter both Dorothy Day and her infant daughter were recieved into the Catholic church.

Dorothy Day’s autobiography, The Long Loneliness, was first published in the 1950s and is very much a spiritual memoir. The 1996 biopic Entertaining Angels, starring Moira Kelly, cleaves fairly close to the story Day told. In the film, Martin Sheen plays Peter Maurin, the irascible refugee philosopher who became Day’s mentor and friend as she moved away from the journalism of her young adult years and into the more direct action of feeding and clothing and housing the needy during the worst years of the Great Depression.

Dorothy Day at a peace demonstration

Throughout the Second World War, Day and her fellow Workers maintained a commitement to pacifism, and following the war Day was arrested numerous times while on nonviolent protest against the Cold War and nuclear proliferation. They also became involved in the Civil Rights movement. There is a movement within the Catholic church to have Dorothy Day canonized as a saint, although throughout her life she resisted efforts to describe her work as somehow super-human, miraculous or otherwise noteworthy.

I, personally, find Dorothy Day an intensely interesting and intensely frustrating historical figure. Although she participated in suffrage activism during the 1910s, she moved away from feminist challenges to the status quo during the 1920s and 30s, and was critical of women who resisted the caretaking work that became central to her life’s project. Although a sharp thinker and gifted writer, she often deflected attention away from herself, crediting Maurin (the male philosopher) for the vision behind the Catholic Worker communities. Self-abnegation, central to the Catholic Workers’ commitment to voluntary poverty, becomes complicated when blended with narratives of gender that emphasis certain aspects of maleness and femaleness as “natural” or “essential.”

Throughout the decades of her involvement in social justice activism Day remained a chronicler, publishing articles that described the Catholic Worker movement and defending its means and aims to the public at large. Many of her writings have been made available at the Catholic Worker Movement website.

7 Responses to “Harpy Hall of Fame: Dorothy Day (1897-1980)”

oooh Anna so so interesting – thanks so much for posting that link to her work. This has got to go on my reading list.

Her intense connection to Catholicism is so fascinating to me. How does a person like her come to Catholicism? Is it this core of beatitude in the NT that is just irresistible to some people? That’s my best guess. She really really lived it.

Your point that starts blended with narratives of gender is a great angle to consider.

One of my favorite and yes, most frustrating foremothers. I worked closely with some Catholic Worker houses in my time and have been in and out of the movement and have never been able to resolve the tensions I have with it (mainly pro life issues — she had an abortion too right?) but I can’t help being so drawn to it too. I have to say I don’t see her as gender essentialist though…but maybe I’ve missed those readings or interviews. Seems to me she demanded the same radical humility and self-abnegation from everyone.

Yes, she did have an abortion prior to her pregnancy with Tamar. It’s been a long time since I read her memoir, but I recall that the abortion was physically traumatic and a decision she later regretted. She believed it had made her infertile and thus her second pregnancy with Tamar is described as a miraculous gift in her personal writings.

This is definitely a troublesome aspect of her biography for feminists. Not that she herself had those experiences, or made the decisions she did, obviously, but the greater cultural and religious meaning she ascribes them in her later writing and activism.

Thank you for your article. Ms. Day is an interesting character. She struggled all her life and is an inspiration. Pope John-Paul II had his faults, but in affirming the Church is a collection of saints struggling with life, he showed some of the traits that is moving him towards sainthood. Her views are attractive, but it is in her ministry that we all benefit from. Paul Brouder. prouder@hotmail.com